The Illusion of Victory (42 page)

As she unwrapped the bandages around the stomach of a Nebraska boy, he told her he had been hit four days ago. Millard recoiled in horror at what she saw: The huge wound was a seething, writhing mass of maggots. She thought the soldier was doomed. But an orderly matter-of-factly handed her a can of ether and told her to spray the strange little organisms. Maggots were a good sign, the orderly said. They prevented gangrene.

Another soldier from Idaho had been blinded in both eyes and lost both feet to shrapnel. She gave him morphine and tried to stop him as he fumbled under the covers to find out what was wrong with his legs. She held him while he screamed and screamed and screamed in despair. Finally the morphine hit and he was still as death.

When one of the older nurses collapsed, Millard volunteered to work in the surgery with Le Brun. To get the job, she had to memorize the French names for dozens of knives, scissors, saws, pincers and probes, any one of which she had to hand Le Brun the instant he asked for it. Soon she was watching amputations, stomach resections, skull trepanning, probing for bullets and shrapnel—the hundreds of medical emergencies created by lethal metal.

One of Le Brun’s more memorable explorations was on an American officer who had been shot in the hip. The bullet had hit a watch, smashing it to pieces and driving the fragments down into the man’s thigh as far as his knee. Le Brun spent an hour extracting tiny bits of crystal, wheels, springs. He did not get them all and remarked that as the doughboy grew older, he would be surprised to discover little metal souvenirs of the Western Front sprouting through his flesh.

The coming of the Americans did not mean that the French ceased to suffer. One night, after operating into the dawn, Millard began sterilizing the instruments while Le Brun smoked one more of his innumerable cigarettes. Into the operating room an orderly wheeled one more case. The man’s face had been shattered by shrapnel from an exploding shell. The entire lower jaw and tongue were gone.

For a moment Le Brun examined the “hideous wound,” Millard wrote in her diary. Then his weary eyes flickered to the man’s gleaming black hair, his straight, proud nose. He glanced up at Millard,“his face ghastlier than it had ever been from fatigue.” He knew the man—and so did she. This was René, one of the surgeon’s closest friends. Millard recalled his last visit to the hospital in the uniform of an Alpine chasseur. Le Brun had introduced him. René seemed the personification of the proud, confident young soldier. He had showed her a picture of his fiancée, who lived in Dijon, and jokingly told Millard she too had freckles. Now there was only “the hideous cavernous wound . . . where the laughing mouth had been.”

Le Brun ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair and cursed for a full minute. Millard felt for René’s pulse. It was still fairly strong. But there were a half dozen blue crosses elsewhere on René’s body, where the examining doctor at the entrance to the operating room had found other wounds. One of his legs was “completely crushed.”

Millard struggled against a swirling dizziness. Was she about to collapse like many other nurses when fatigue and accumulated horror pushed them over the edge? She controlled her nerves with a violent act of the will and began handing Le Brun instruments. He worked quickly, fiercely, but every few minutes he stopped and stared mournfully into space.

Millard lost track of time. She only remembered Le Brun’s calling for more anesthesia when René stirred and groaned. “
Encore,
” the surgeon snarled. His voice was harsh. Abruptly, he stopped asking Millard for instruments. Millard knew what it meant. There was no hope for René.

Le Brun stripped off his gloves and stumbled out of the operating room. At the door, he asked Millard to find the address of René’s fiancée and write a letter, telling her they had done everything they could. Millard could only nod numbly, wondering if the dying would ever end.

In the White House, Woodrow Wilson was confronted with war on another front. On July 8, 1918, he wrote to Colonel House:“I have been sweating blood over the question of what is right and feasible to do in Russia. It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.” the president was under terrific pressure from the Allies to join them in sending an expeditionary force to the chaotic nation. At first, the French and British thought men with guns could rally anti-German sentiment against the Bolsheviks and keep Russia in the war. Paradoxically, even after the Russians signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks tried to keep this latter hope alive by offering to ignore the treaty and continue the war if the Allies recognized them as the legitimate government of Russia. At the same time, Lenin made it clear that they did not want an expeditionary force.
⁶⁶

From the start of the Bolshevik takeover, motivations had been opaque but not entirely invisible. Most British politicians shared Winston Churchill’s desire to exterminate this Marxist incubus from the moment it appeared. Their own rigid class society was too vulnerable to a radical upheaval to tolerate anyone shouting,“Workers of the world, unite!” Secretary of State Lansing was not far from this opinion. He told Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long that the Bolsheviks were more dangerous to the United States than the Germans.
⁶⁷

After General Lavr Kornilov’s British-backed march on Petrograd collapsed, London’s agents focused on General Alexei Kaledin, who seemed to be leading some sort of anti-Bolshevik movement in south Russia. At one point Wilson agreed with a plan to funnel him aid through Rumania. The president also looked with some favor on the idea of the Japanese landing an army in Siberia to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing the huge amounts of war matériel in and around Vladivostok. For a while this scheme was stalled by frantic messages from British and American representatives in Moscow, who were trying to work out some sort of deal with the Bolsheviks. Every Russian from Murmansk to Sevastopol hated the Japanese and if they became Allied surrogates on Russian soil, all hope of any positive relationship with Lenin’s regime—or any other Russian government—would cease.
⁶⁸

Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson had acquired an intense dislike for Lenin; he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace. Wilson wanted to believe that he and Trotsky were German agents. When the president got his hands on some dubious documents purporting to prove his case, he published them under the imprimatur of the U.S. government. By May 30, 1918, Wilson had developed an unmistakably belligerent attitude toward the Bolsheviks:“If . . .we were invited to intervene by any responsible and representative body, we ought to do so.” But where did such a body exist?
⁶⁹

The president finally acquiesced to a Japanese invasion of Siberia. Calling it a “policing action,” he ordered 7,000 American troops to join them. Their arrival on Russian soil was preceded by a solemn statement from Wilson that they had no desire to interfere in the Russian Revolution. He soon discovered he might have to interfere in Japan’s plans to seize a large chunk of Siberia. The two armies were supposed to be the same size, but the Japanese claimed the Americans had violated the agreement by sending along 2,000 civilians. Tokyo felt this lapse entitled it to expand its army to a whopping 69,000 men. The British, loath to be shouldered out of a sphere of influence anywhere in the world, dispatched 2,000 men to show the Union Jack and urged the French to follow suit.

On the other side of the globe, the French and English had dispatched a force to Murmansk, supposedly to protect war matériel there. In fact, they went busily to work to set up an anti-Bolshevik government. With even greater reluctance than he displayed in the Siberian venture, Wilson dispatched American troops to join them. Scholars have spent the intervening nine decades arguing about what the president thought he was doing. His ongoing dislike of Lenin might well be the best explanation.
⁷⁰

Throughout this torturous political exercise, there is no record of Wilson’s expressing the slightest interest in the fate of Czar Nicholas Romanoff and his family. When Nicholas was first overthrown, there was talk of the Romanoffs’ receiving asylum in England. But their kinship with the British royal family could not overcome Conservative Party fears that their presence might cause labor union unrest. The Provisional Government of Russia was equally reluctant to let the czar and his family go, fearing they could become the focus of a counterrevolution.

Just before the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, the deposed monarch and his family were moved to the remote Siberian city of Ekaterinburg. On July 16, 1918, the Bolsheviks herded them into the cellar of the mansion in which they were living. The czar, his wife, Alexandra, his son, Alexis, and his three daughters listened in disbelief as a death sentence was read to them by a representative of the Ural Soviet. A moment later, they were shot at point-blank range. Their bodies were burned and the ashes flung into a nearby swamp.

From Murmansk to Vladivostok, similar Bolshevik brutality and equally brutal retaliation from their enemies soon rendered Wilson’s carefully wrought cautionary words about American intervention irrelevant. A vast civil war had begun; it would kill more Russians than the Germans and Austrians slaughtered on the Eastern Front.

The Russian enigma exposed the president’s greatest weakness as a wartime statesman—his tendency to rely on words rather than acts. He and Colonel House were discovering that Philip Dru–style leadership did not work in a chaotic world. Along with a miscomprehension of the outbreak of political evil in Russia, House/Wilson/Dru seemed unable or unwilling to admit what was now driving the policies of England and France: that supposedly evil word, imperialism. The future grew crowded with gloomy portents as the war to make the world safe for democracy thundered to a climax on the Western Front.
⁷¹

Having seized the initiative, Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch was determined not to relinquish it. For the last six weeks of the summer of 1918, he ordered attacks all around the Marne salient. In the vanguard were American divisions fighting under French generals. This little-studied Aisne-Marne offensive demonstrated the courage of the American infantrymen—and the limitations of their open-warfare tactics. Before it ended in early September, more than 90,000 Americans were dead or wounded.

The Rainbow Division was one of the hardest-fighting outfits in this campaign. Its best-known soldier was Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, who won attention in several unconventional ways. MacArthur designed his own distinctive uniform; he removed the metal band from his cap, giving it a casual, sporty look. A turtleneck sweater, highly polished leather puttees and a riding crop added to his debonair, soldier-of-fortune image. Equally unusual was MacArthur’s fondness for personal reconnaissances into no-man’s-land in the darkness, armed only with his riding crop. He scorned the idea of wearing a helmet or using a gas mask and participated in trench raids, winning the Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. Reporters, some of them his admirers from his days as Secretary of War Newton Baker’s spokesman in Washington, called him “the D’Artagnan of the AEF.” Privately, however, the war was transforming MacArthur’s ideas about military glory. After the brutal fighting that stopped the German attempt to cross the Marne on July 15, he found himself haunted by the “vision of those writhing bodies hanging from the barbed wire” and “the stench of dead flesh.”
¹

During the Aisne-Marne campaign, MacArthur continued to embellish his hero image, repeatedly exposing himself to German shells and bullets to inspire his men. At one point, between directing attacks and exploring no-man’s-land at night, he went without sleep for ninety-six hours. The fighting was frequently ferocious. The town of Sergy on the Ourcq River, defended by the crack Prussian Guards division, changed hands seven times in a single day.

Relieved after nine horrendous days, the men of the Rainbow stumbled to the rear. Father Francis Duffy, the division’s chaplain, described them: “Our decimated battalions . . . marched in weary silence until they came to the slopes around Meurcy Farm. Then from end to end of the line came the sound of dry suppressed sobs. They were marching among the bodies of their unburied dead.” MacArthur’s brigade lost 2,835 men out of 5,135 in its ranks when the offensive began.
²

Again and again, the Rainbow and other American divisions found their flanks lethally exposed by the failure of a French division to keep pace with their attack.“For Christ’s sake, knock out the machine guns on our right,” begged one anguished battalion commander. “Heavy casualties. What troops should be on my right and left and where are they?”

The French repeatedly ordered the Americans to make attacks that were close to suicidal and gave them objectives they could never reach. Major General Robert Lee Bullard, now a corps commander of two American divisions, fretted about the casualties but could do little else. He had to take orders from General Joseph Degoutte, commander of the French Sixth Army.
³

By August 27, 1918, the Germans had retreated to the northern bank of the Vesle River. A French order sent two understrength companies of the Twenty-Eighth Division (about 200 men) across the river to seize the hamlet of Fismette. An appalled Bullard tried to withdraw them—they were the only troops on that side of the river, surrounded by some 200,000 Germans. General Degoutte, with the same indifference to casualties he had displayed at Belleau Wood, revoked Bullard’s order. The Germans attacked in overwhelming force from three sides, using every weapon in their armory, including flamethrowers. They killed or captured all but 39 of the isolated Americans.

Bullard reported the disaster to Pershing, who met him a few days later and asked him why he had not disobeyed General Degoutte’s order.“I did not answer. It was not necessary to answer,” Bullard wrote in his memoir, implying all too clearly that he considered Pershing the man at fault for the messy Aisne-Marne experience.
⁴

While the Americans struggled, on August 8, 1918, the British army made a successful attack on the western flank of the salient the Germans had created with their rout of the Fifth Army in March. Supported by tanks and swarms of planes, the British advanced almost twenty miles and captured thousands of prisoners. Foch, the apostle of the offensive, was suddenly the right general in the right place at the right time.“
Tout le monde a la bataille!”
became his mantra. Everyone fights!
⁵

By this time, five American divisions—more than 150,000 men—were serving under Field Marshal Douglas Haig. Pershing had permitted these divisions to go directly into British training areas when they arrived in Europe. These semi-surrenders of control were the price Foch and Haig wrung from Pershing, with the help of Ludendorff ’s storm troopers. But the AEF commander never stopped insisting on an independent army.

On August 10 Pershing opened First Army headquarters, and on August 15 he handed Foch a plan for an attack on the Saint-Mihiel salient, another huge bulge in the French lines, south of Verdun. He extracted three of his five divisions from a choleric Douglas Haig and withdrew his other divisions from French control.

On August 28, as the Americans moved into the lines around Saint-Mihiel, Foch descended on Pershing with one last attempt to steal his army. The generalissimo announced the whole German battlefront was one huge salient and should be attacked from the north, the south and the center. Foch wanted Pershing to more or less abort the Saint-Mihiel operation, limiting it to a few divisions while the rest of the American army was transferred back to French control for attacks in Champagne and the Argonne valley.

A stupendous argument erupted. At one point both men were on their feet screaming curses at each other.“Do you wish to take part in the battle?” Foch shrilled, the ultimate insult one general could throw at another.
⁶

“As an American army and in no other way!” Pershing replied.

“I must insist on the arrangement!” Foch shouted.

Pershing stuck out his granite jaw.“Marshal Foch, you may insist all you please but I decline absolutely to agree to your plan. While our army will fight wherever you decide, it will fight only as an independent American Army.”
⁷

After another week of wrangling, Pershing accepted a dangerous compromise. He would attack the Saint-Mihiel salient on September 12 as planned and then transfer the bulk of his 500,000-man army west of the Meuse River to attack through the Argonne valley on September 26 as part of the overall Allied offensive. It was a staggering assignment for a general who had never commanded more than a single division in action and whose staff had yet to plan a major battle. Only a man with Pershing’s self-confidence would have tried it.

On September 5, Pershing, disturbed by AEF casualties in the Aisne-Marne offensive, made a stab at defining open warfare. In a general order, he contrasted it to trench warfare, which he claimed was “marked by uniform formations, the regulation of space and time by higher commands down to the smallest details and little initiative.” Open warfare had irregular formations, comparatively little regulation of space and time, and the greatest possible use of the infantry’s own fire power to enable it to “get forward . . . [with] brief orders” and “the greatest possible use of individual initiative.”

It was much too late for this condensed version of storm-trooper tactics to filter down even to division staffs, much less to the captains and lieutenants leading companies. The instructions also omitted some vital components of the storm-trooper innovations—a reliance not on rifles but on grenades and flank attacks to deal with enemy machine guns, coupled with a precise use of artillery and mortars.
⁸

At first, Pershing’s luck seemed to hold. The Saint-Mihiel offensive was the walkover of the war. The Germans were withdrawing from the salient when the Americans attacked. Resistance was perfunctory. The bag of prisoners and captured guns was big enough to make headlines, although the take was not nearly as large as originally hoped.

Historically speaking, the most noteworthy side of Saint-Mihiel was the first appearance of Americans in tanks. The machines were all French, built by the Renault Motor Company. The Wilson administration had been as feckless in tank production as in aircraft, with a net output of zero, in spite of the usual tens of millions spent. The commander of one brigade, which totaled 174 tanks, was a former Pershing aide, Colonel George S. Patton, Jr.

The top speed of these lumbering vehicles was four miles per hour. Their mission was to precede the infantry and knock out machine-gun nests. Communications were primitive. The tanks had no radios. Attempts
to use signal flags were an instant failure; machine-gun fire shredded them. Lead tanks were equipped with carrier pigeons in a basket, but in the excitement of battle, the baskets—and the birds—were soon squashed. In lieu of any better communications system, the captains in command of the companies walked from tank to tank to deliver firing instructions.

Colonel Patton disobeyed the orders of the titular commander of the tank corps, General Samuel D. Rockenbach, and followed the tanks into action on foot. “I will not sit in a dugout and have my men out in the fighting,” he told his wife. At one point, Patton mounted the turret of a tank to encourage the crew to attack a village. When German machine-gun bullets struck the tank, the daring colonel reluctantly took cover in a shell hole. At another point, Patton encountered MacArthur on the chaotic battlefield. A German rolling barrage moved toward them. Both refused to take cover, although Patton wryly told his wife they had trouble keeping track of their conversation as the shells got closer.
⁹

On the battlefield Patton’s tanks encountered a squadron of the Second U.S. Cavalry Regiment. The horsemen had captured a sizable number of German prisoners and were contemptuous of the sluggish, clanking tanks. By this time, forty of the iron steeds had gotten stuck in the mud. Incensed, Patton ordered a patrol of three tanks to attack the main German defenses, the Michel Line, at the bottom of the salient. The tankers fought a pointblank duel with German artillery and returned with the breech block of a knocked-out 77-millimeter gun. That night, Patton excitedly discussed with his officers the possibility of tanks becoming independent of the infantry and smashing through fortified lines to wreak havoc in the enemy rear. It was the first glimmer of the armor tactics of World War II.
¹⁰

Pershing and his staff now tried to imitate the Germans and gain surprise in the Argonne. They left most of their veteran divisions in the Saint-Mihiel lines and shifted largely green units west. No significant bottlenecks developed on the few available roads, thanks to the planning genius of Colonel George C. Marshall, now a key deputy of Brigadier General Hugh Drum, the First Army’s chief of staff. Fellow toilers at headquarters nicknamed Marshall “the Wizard” for managing the sixty-mile move in wretched, rainy weather. The thirty-seven-year old Virginia Military Institute graduate had obviously not compromised his career by talking back to Pershing in Lorraine a year ago.
¹¹

On September 26, after a 4,000-gun artillery barrage, Pershing threw 250,000 men in three corps at an estimated 50,000 German defenders in the twenty-mile-wide Argonne valley. A massive hogback (a ridge with steeply sloping sides) ran down the center of this rugged landscape, forcing the attackers into defiles on both sides. It was, Major General Hunter Liggett said, a natural fortress that made the Virginia Wilderness of the Civil War seem like a park. Yet Pershing’s plan called for no less than a ten mile line abreast advance on the first day to crack the Kreimhilde Stellung, the main German defense line.

Five of Pershing’s nine divisions had never been in action before. The rush to get an army to France had left tens of thousands of soldiers with little or no training. Even experienced outfits such as the Seventy-Seventh Division, which had been blooded under the French in Champagne, were full of raw replacements. On the day before they attacked, the Seventy-Seventh received 2,100 men who had never fired a rifle.
¹²

Everything imaginable proceeded to go wrong with Pershing’s army. The Germans fell back to well-prepared defenses, and machine guns began mowing down charging Americans. Massive amounts of enemy artillery on the heights east of the Meuse and along the edge of the Argonne forest, which loomed a thousand feet above the valley floor on the west, exacted an even heavier toll.

Rigid orders, issued by Pershing’s staff, held up divisions at crucial moments. The Fourth Division could have captured the key height of Montfaucon on the first day, but it stood still for four hours, waiting for the green Seventy-Ninth Division, which had been assigned the objective, to come abreast of it. By the time Montfaucon fell the following day, the Germans had poured five first-class divisions into the Argonne and the American advance stumbled to a bloody halt.
¹³

To the north, where the British and French were attacking, the Germans could give ground for 60–100 miles before yielding anything vital. Only 24 miles from the American jump-off point in the Argonne was the Sedan-Mézières four-track railroad, which supplied almost all the food and ammunition to the kaiser’s northern armies. In the Argonne, the Germans were fighting to protect their jugular, and by October 4, they had elements of twenty-three divisions in line and local reserve. Ferocious counterattacks demoralized green American divisions. At one point, the Thirty-Fifth Division, farm boys from Missouri and Kansas, teetered on the brink of rout. They were rescued by direct fire from their artillery, including a battery manned by Captain Harry S. Truman. With casualties of more than 50 percent, the division was withdrawn.
¹⁴